The thought that Lanie might have killed our father was too horrible for me to entertain, and so I raced to a more comfortable conclusion: Maggie Kallas was lying. I didn’t know why—could someone be paying her?—but I didn’t care. If Maggie was lying, that meant my sister wasn’t. I almost regretted not agreeing to give Poppy Parnell a quote; maybe she would have let me talk directly to Maggie.
An online search turned up women named Margaret Kallas living in Omaha, Portland, Charleston, Phoenix, and somewhere called Telephone, Texas. Uncertain which (if any) she was, I snagged Ellen’s phone and combed through her Facebook friends. Sure enough, Maggie Kallas was listed, and, in an unexpected boon, Maggie’s number was listed on her profile. I jotted down the number and replaced Ellen’s phone where I found it.
Later, I hid in the garage and dialed Maggie’s number. I held my breath as the phone rang, nearly choking when she answered.
“Is this Maggie Kallas?” I asked, even though I recognized her voice from the podcast.
“It is. Who’s this, please?”
“This is Josie Buhrman,” I began.
“How did you get this number?” she demanded, her cordial demeanor vanishing.
Panicked that she would hang up before I had a chance to learn anything, I blurted, “Are you lying about seeing Warren Cave?”
All I heard was the subtle click of the call disconnecting. When I tried to call back, the phone rang once and then diverted to voicemail. As I called again and again without success, I wondered what it meant: Was she avoiding me because she was lying? Or just avoiding me because she worried I would accuse her of such? How would I know if she wouldn’t talk to me?
For our last night in Elm Park, Caleb suggested taking Aunt A (and, by default, Ellen) out to dinner. We skipped Ray’s Bistro in favor of one of the self-consciously hip restaurants that recently popped up near campus. These new additions made me smile, remembering how my father used to theatrically moan there was nowhere to get a decent meal on campus. The particular restaurant we visited was a farm-to-table outfit that called itself The Three Sisters and featured murals of the three sisters themselves (squash, corn, and bean) created by local artists. With its herb-heavy cocktail list and water glasses made from repurposed bottles, it would blend seamlessly into our block back in Brooklyn. When I mentioned that, Aunt A surprised me by saying she would love to visit us. She had never expressed interest in New York before—which was just as well, considering the lies I had told Caleb about her—and I was pleased to see Caleb encourage her visit, taking a pen to a paper cocktail napkin and beginning a list of sights she might be interested in.
The four of us had such a nice dinner that by the time our waiter, a college-aged kid with the beard of a lumberjack, set the letterpress dessert menu on the table, I had almost forgotten that I had ever heard of Poppy Parnell.
“What do you think, ladies?” Caleb asked with a grin. “Dessert?”
“None for me,” Ellen said, smiling daintily as she pushed the menu away.
“Well, I for one could use some indulgence,” Aunt A said.
“What do you recommend?” I asked the waiter as I glanced down at the selections.
I froze.
“My personal favorite is the brown-butter blondie served with vanilla bean ice cream and a cinnamon-chocolate drizzle,” the waiter was saying, but all I could see was the first item on the menu, something called “Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake.” My stomach soured; an unexplainable sense of déjà vu disoriented me.
“Jo?” Caleb asked. “Are you okay?”
Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake.
Why was that dessert so unnerving?
Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake. Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake.
A fragment of something flashed across my mind, the same memory that had nagged at me when Adam had mentioned Lanie baking all of those cupcakes. Only suddenly it crystallized and became clear. My stomach flipped, and I pressed a hand to my mouth.
“The cupcake,” our waiter continued, oblivious, “is also very special.”
That cupcake was special.
Abruptly, I pushed myself away from the table, rattling the funky water glasses and startling not only my family and our waiter, but also the other tables surrounding us. I rushed to the dimly lit restroom, thanked my lucky stars that it was a single stall and that it was unoccupied, and proceeded to gag up my $30 piece of fish.
I remembered the day of the cupcakes.
The summer I was fifteen, I had a nasty case of the stomach flu. After three straight days of vomiting, I awoke from an afternoon nap feeling slightly better and also ravenous, having eaten nothing for the last fifty hours. I pushed myself out of bed and weakly made my way downstairs.
There were cupcakes on the table: three of them decorated with small pink flowers on one plate, a larger cupcake with red rosettes resting apart on a blue china plate. The chocolate frosting glistened, tempting me. Too hungry to resist, I grabbed the largest cupcake and took a huge bite.
As I chewed, I heard the back door open and my mother and Lanie enter the house. I froze. My desperate hunger subsiding, guilt surfaced. Our mother was a frequent baker, but she had little patience for decorating cupcakes unless there was a specific reason. More likely than not, the cupcakes had been destined for an event at my father’s school, or some celebration my mother had been planning. At that point, however, there was no way for me to disguise my bite marks, and so I settled for destroying the evidence and crammed another huge bite in my mouth.
My mother entered the dining room with a vase full of freshly cut flowers and stopped in her tracks when she saw me.
“Josie! You’re up!”
I nodded, chewing furiously while I hid the remainder of the cupcake behind my back.
She blinked. Her eyes jumped to the empty plate and then back to me.
“Did you take that cupcake?” she asked, her voice high and thin, a telltale sign that she was irritable.
Ashamed, I produced the rest of the cupcake. Still chewing, I mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
She dropped the vase on the ground and flew at me, one hand yanking open my jaw and the fingers from her other hand digging in my mouth, pulling masticated bits of cupcake out and flinging them on the ground.
“That cupcake was special!” she barked. “It was for your father for our anniversary. Can’t you see that? You stupid, selfish girl!”
“You’re hurting me!” I cried, trying to twist out of her grasp. “I’m sorry. Please stop!”
“You’ve ruined everything,” she insisted, readjusting so that my neck was lodged in the crook of her elbow, her fingers still in my mouth, choking me. Tears streamed down my face as she continued. “This was supposed to be special, and you ruined it. Everything is ruined.”